Geraldine listened with her eyes cast up, hands folded in her lap, a demure smile on her lips. A portrait of quiet enjoyment. She was, in fact, the perfect audience. Not so diffident as to make Petra doubt her performance, and not so effusive as to make Petra doubt Geraldine’s sincerity.
Not every main character has to be likeable or sympathetic—really, all you need to hold a reader’s attention is relatable or interesting—but likeable is the most straightforward version of relatable. I very much wanted readersto like Geraldine: first of all because I wanted them to see what Petra saw in her, and secondly because the conflict later in the story means nothing if the reader finds her unsympathetic. I looked for ways to make the reader approve of her, and here is one of them—Geraldine as the perfect audience, appreciating the thing Petra appreciates most herself. Tiny acts of casual kindness go a long way toward likability, just as tiny acts of selfishness or casual cruelty go a long way toward unlikability. A good character is a combination of both … just like a real person.
“You read beautifully,” Geraldine said. “You are just as Marla described.”
“Uh, thank you.” Petra was clumsy again. One of her favorite aspects of the Two-Three was that speakers escaped behind the stage as soon as their reading was over. She didn’t know how to accept compliments. A lot of Petra’s problems would dissolve if every interaction ended with either applause or bored silence from twenty feet away or more.
“Do you need a break?” Geraldine asked. “I need to water some of my plants, so you could rest while I do that.”
Petra did not need to rest—it took more than three stanzas of iambic octameter to wear her out—but she didn’t want to be rude. There were so many plants that it took nearly the rest of Petra’s scheduled time; she only had time to read two more poems (Geraldine asked for the context for both, although Petra had context for neither).
I believe every writer in the world has heard the advice “Show, don’t tell.” It’s fine advice, and certainly the secret to tricking a reader into feeling and seeing things your way. But it’s also oversimplified advice, and my early attempts to slavishly follow it resulted in some very oddly paced stories. I couldn’t figure out how to show passing of time in an abbreviated way, and so I ended up with stories that only took place over one day, every minute laboriously chronicled, because I didn’t know how to not write every moment awake. The answer is telling, not showing. Sometimes you have to say “Time passed,” and sometimes that is not wrong. If nothing is happening in a space of time—or, more importantly, if nothing new is happening in a space of time—skip it. Tell how much time we lost if you must. The advice should really be “Show (a lot), tell (a little).”
Then Geraldine clasped Petra’s hand in farewell, as straight and energetic as when Petra had arrived. “I do so hope that you enjoyed this wonderful afternoon as much as I, and that you’ll come again.”
“Uh, thanks,” Petra replied, because that was evidently all she knew how to say when she was not performing.
Geraldine held onto Petra’s hand for long enough that Petra wasn’t sure if she was supposed to take it back or wait for it to be returned to her. Finally, Geraldine said, “Petra. The feminine form of Peter, which is, as you know, from the Greek for ‘rock.’”
More like a boulder, really, Petra thought. Her ears were at the ready for another blush.
But Geraldine seemed to anticipate the wave and then part it. “A unique, beautiful name. A foundation for something, certainly.”
“Oh,” said Petra. “Uh, thanks.”
The last things Petra saw before the door closed were the same smiling eyes that she’d been greeted with hours before.
As she descended the stairs, the hero’s journey into hell, the knock-kneed decline not quite as arduous as the climb but taxing nonetheless, her phone dinged as an e-mail came in: “You’ve got money!” Marla had efficiently sent Petra’s fee via PayPal. Whatever Petra had just done for the past two hours, it was a job.
• • •
Petra took the 32 bus home. Early holiday shoppers kept pace with them on the sidewalk. As Petra disembarked the bus, a homeless man shouted that he’d like to see her without her sweater on. She went so red that he went red too: a new personal low.
“How’s my hero?” Petra’s mother asked at home. “Super proud of you. All the kisses.” She didn’t ask: Did anyone laugh at you when you dropped your tray in the cafeteria because the girl behind you said “excuse me”? or Have you worked out how to walk without feeling like Jabba the Hutt? or Were you able to answer a question without blushing? She never asked for context. She just clapped as Petra ducked backstage.
“Uh, thanks,” said Petra. On her phone’s search engine, she typed “Algernon Charles Swinburne dead love.”
• • •
The next time Petra climbed the stairs to Geraldine’s apartment, the sounds of classical music greeted her at the top stair. The violins, somewhat faint, became louder as Petra expired on the concrete, bringing her ear closer to the crack beneath Geraldine’s door. Whatever she was playing, she was playing it loudly.
Petra clawed feebly at the door; Geraldine opened it. The music swelled hugely around her silhouette.
“These stairs are terrible,” Geraldine apologized to the deceased, crisp voice audible even through the violins. “I’ve told them I simply won’t go out again until they put in an elevator, but I don’t think that will ever happen so I suppose I am in here for always. Come in and have a cup of tea, poor thing. I’m so glad you’ve come.”
Inside, Petra lowered her backpack to one of the sofas and rubbed her aching kneecaps. Geraldine handed her a cup, nursing the climber back to health.
“Uh, thanks,” Petra said, and then immediately went red as she realized she had already begun with her signature statement. “Where is the music coming from?”
Geraldine seemed delighted to be asked. Gesturing for Petra to follow, she moved elegantly through a company of ferns until she came to a sizeable and apparently ancient record player. The music roared so loudly that the cabinet vibrated. As the song drew to a close, a miraculous clockwork arm descended to remove the completed record and replace it with a new one.
“Oh, coo—very interesting,” Petra said as the music began again. It was loud, but tinny, like it was being piped in from another century.
Geraldine smiled approvingly, hands clasped, rings carefully not clicking together. “This next one will be Brahms’s Lullaby. ‘Cradle Song,’ more correctly.” She leaned toward Petra, and her voice lowered. “Once upon a time, Brahms had a lover who used to sing to him, and years later, long after they’d separated, he wrote this piece when she had a child with her new husband. He used her old melody as a countermelody, knowing she’d recognize it! Then he sent the finished piece to her and her husband.”
Petra thought this sounded like a fairly assholey thing to do, but she couldn’t think of a Geraldine sort of way to express such a sentiment out loud.
Geraldine said, “It always struck me as a singularly unpleasant impulse.”
Ah.
“Singularly unpleasant,” Petra repeated, feeling Geraldine’s precise accent in her mouth. Geraldine smiled at her, recognizing herself. “I’ve heard this song a lot of times before, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard the, uh, real version.”
She watched Geraldine crouch by a screened cabinet, opening it to reveal a vast collection of charmingly tatty record sleeves. She tried to figure out how Geraldine managed to look perfectly posed even when crouching. Possibly Petra didn’t have the back and neck muscles necessary to stand straight at all times. Possibly she had been born with fewer muscles. Possibly Geraldine was like a fine show horse and Petra’s genes tended more toward some lumbering beast meant to haul wagons.
A good narrative has purpose. Something to gain or explain, to untangle or resolve. Stakes! of the internal or external variety. At the most basic level, this is a plot. A hook to snag the reader’s curiosity and pull
it through the story. A writer doesn’t have to immediately introduce the stakes—often, in fact, you’ll need a bit of time to set up the story’s world so that the reader can understand the stakes at all (this is really obvious in Tessa’s story)—but I try to seed them through the story as early as possible. In this case, Petra’s stakes involve her self-image, so I lean pretty heavily on this unresolved issue.
A moment ago, I said “internal or external” about stakes, and then I didn’t explain myself. I’m explaining myself now. Internal stakes are character-driven stakes: Petra is uncomfortable with her body—will she find a way to resolve this? External stakes are imposed by circumstances outside of the character’s head: later, Petra has to save Geraldine’s life—will she find a way to accomplish that? A clever writer braids internal and external stakes together so tightly that it becomes difficult to tell which is which. Petra’s ability to solve an external problem becomes influenced by her ability to solve her internal problems. This is boss-level writing, and it’s the most satisfying sort to read.)
All the same, Petra pushed her own shoulders back and raised her chin a bit. As she did, she caught another glance of red-brown stain by the edge of the rug, the same color as the stain on the edge of the teacup. The dramatic side of Petra wanted it to be a bloodstain, but it was probably furniture polish.
Then Geraldine stood, her tidy shoe hiding the mark from view. She held an empty sleeve in her hands. “I think I’ll retire this one for a bit. Would you hand me the record?”
Petra didn’t know the first thing about how to remove a record from the machine. She was sure it was a quite simple process, but knowing that and still not being sure of how to tackle it made it worse. Immediately she blushed, hot and complete. It’s just a record, she told herself, just lift it, probably. But another part of her whispered, There’s bits you have to move out of the way; what if you break it? Imagine her crouched there perfectly and you the mountain troll looming over her with wires and cranks in your paws. And then the first part said, Do it now, she’s going to think you’re an idiot just standing here. Immediately followed by She’ll think you’re more of an idiot when you can’t work it out.
“That one is a little tricky,” Geraldine said smoothly. “You have to push that fiddly bit there to stop it spinning. And then make sure you lift the needle arm straight up or it will make a terrible creaking sound. And of course just touch the edges or the label, but you know that.”
Petra removed the record, feeling unduly accomplished.
If I could be a floating writing godmother for all new writers, I would whisper over and over in their ears, “Be specific!” It’s not enough for me to write that Petra is shy and awkward. That describes too many people in the world; the reader’s no closer to knowing Petra in particular. I need to pile on the specific ways this manifests in her life, being as realistic as I can manage. Sometimes I rely on my own feelings for this, but that only goes so far—if I use only my own feelings, I’ll just end up writing a character that is me. So I turn to careful observation of other people. When I meet someone new, I like to play a game called “make this person a character.” I imagine how I would write them: How would I describe their appearance so that others immediately understood how it felt to meet them? How would I sum up their personality so that a reader would know them at once? Specifics.
Geraldine slid the record back into its sleeve. “This piece was very popular, you know, even in Brahms’s day. His publisher released many different arrangements for it to appeal to all sorts of players, from the most skilled to the least.” She smiled, delighted by her beloved context. “I adore this bitter Brahms quote—he said, ‘Why not make a new edition in a minor key for naughty or sick children? That would be still another way to move copies.’”
Petra laughed. “I don’t think I’ll ever listen to that piece the same way.”
“Such is the power of context! We make our own, you know, and carry it with us.” Geraldine gestured first to the ferns around her and then to her hair and clothing. “All of this makes you understand this in a different way.” She pressed her hand over her heart.
That was a terrible lesson Petra had already learned about herself.
Geraldine touched Petra’s cheek with a finger; the cold touch of her skin demonstrated Petra’s blush clearly. “What have you brought to read today?”
Petra was being rescued. She was relieved.
“I tried to look up context for the Swinburne poems last night,” she admitted. “I didn’t find anything about, uh, ‘Dead Love’ or the other one. But I found some stuff about Swinburne.”
“And?”
In fact, most of what Petra had found had to do with Swinburne’s habit of hiring prostitutes to beat him, but she couldn’t think of a Geraldine way to say that. So she just said, “It turns out that he was, uh … singularly unpleasant.”
Geraldine laughed with delight. “They all are, my dear.”
“I’ve composed an introduction,” Petra said. It was the sort of sentence that the babies—her younger sisters—would have giggled over, but it seemed about right in this place. As Geraldine settled herself into a small wicker chair, Petra turned to a page marked by a sticky note the color of a robin’s egg. In her orator voice, she announced, “I am going to read ‘The Eve of Revolution,’ which is from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise. I chose this one because I was reading about his life, and one of the things I thought was interesting about him was that he lived a life of drunken and gleeful debauchery”—Petra tried not to pause too long at that part, although she’d thought a lot about her introduction, and she was badly pleased with the phrase “gleeful debauchery”—“such that it seemed like he was on a track to be dead of alcoholism at a young age.”
She faltered. “Dead of alcoholism” was not at all what she had planned to say, and it sounded clumsy enough that she doubted herself. It was so much easier to read someone else’s words.
Geraldine asked, “Did he die of alcoholism?”
Die of alcoholism. It sounded better when Geraldine said it—was it because it was in present tense? No, it was because she sounded distinct when she said it.
Petra did her best to enunciate clearly as she continued, “He didn’t die at a young age, but only because his friend and lawyer took him into his home and nursed him back to health.”
“As lawyers should,” Geraldine said, which was the first joke Petra had heard her make. “Edith is a lawyer. I should remind her of this. Continue!”
“Later, someone would say—” Petra forgot who the someone was but pressed on, just as she would if she forgot a word in a poem. The point was to sound like you had missed nothing. “—that his lawyer ‘saved the man but killed the poet.’ But he was very prolific those first few years he was there, and so I’ve chosen ‘The Eve of Revolution’ because it is from one of the first volumes he published there. How is that?”
Geraldine didn’t answer at first—she didn’t realize Petra was addressing her, and Petra had spoken very tentatively, unused to asking for feedback from her audience. “Oh! It was very good. Masterfully done. I liked ‘gleeful debauchery.’ ”
Pleased, Petra began to read the poem: four hundred uneven lines of fiddly rhyme and lovely language. As she read the stanza that had made her choose the poem in the first place, she saw Geraldine smile again:
Light, light, and light! to break and melt in sunder
All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind
Eyes, hands, and spirits, forged by fear and wonder
And sleek fierce fraud with hidden knife behind;
There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder,
Nor are the links not malleable that wind
Round the snared limbs and souls that ache thereunder;
The hands are mighty, were the head not blind.
Priest is the staff of king,
And chains and clouds one thing,
And fettered flesh with devastated mind.
Open thy soul to see,
Slave, and thy feet are free;
Thy bonds and thy beliefs are one in kind,
And of thy fears thine irons wrought
Hang weights upon thee fashioned out of thine own thought.
When Petra was done, she added, “Here’s another thing I liked about Swinburne! He used to walk around declaiming—that’s what they called it. Declaiming poetry to people like a madman, whenever the moment hit him.”
Geraldine didn’t immediately respond, and Petra couldn’t recall why she had begun this confession after her delivery. She fell hastily silent. Her ears burned once again. Really what she liked about that aspect of Swinburne was the idea that if Petra did that—walked around declaiming—she’d never go red. Because she could always speak clearly as long as she was reciting.
“I always think that I am declaiming,” Geraldine replied thoughtfully. “Performing, yes? I suppose that sounds like I’m being insincere; if I speak out loud, it is for the benefit of other people—I want it to be composed in such a way that they understand me. If I don’t care how other people interpret an idea, I don’t say it out loud. I don’t need to hear myself to know my thoughts.”
Petra thought this over. “So you’re saying that you think before you open your mouth.”
“I’m saying that I think all the time,” Geraldine said, “I only speak for other people.”
“I’d like to be you when I grow up,” Petra blurted.
She had said it out loud. She couldn’t believe that she’d actually said it out loud.
Her skin figured it out before her brain did. She went red so fast that her cheeks hurt.
Geraldine spoke loudly to be heard over the color of Petra’s ears, “What a lovely thing to say. I’m much nicer than I used to be. I was a savage young thing.”
Petra still couldn’t speak; she was blushing too hard. She couldn’t meet Geraldine’s eyes.
“Just give it words,” Geraldine suggested. “That will help. You don’t have to pretend it’s not happening. Just give it words that you like. Say it in a pretty way.”
The Anatomy of Curiosity Page 3
